[coreboot] splash screen

[Jordan Crouse]

On 02/10/08 02:30 +0200, Peter Stuge wrote:
> Jordan Crouse wrote:
> > As a comparison - Ron's screenshot:
> > 
> > .png - 97466  bytes
> > .jpg - 46877  bytes
> > .rle - 24846  bytes
> 
> What about .lzma? If it's going into the larball, we already have
> compression implemented, and it would be nice to have lossless
> graphics and less computation.
>
> Maybe we can even blit? How does lzma perform on bitmaps?
> 
> 
> > Implementation wise - the LSS16 function I just wrote is about 40
> > lines of code with lots of whitespace.
> 
> My only problem with LSS16 is that it's clearly designed for, and
> thus limited to, a 16-color VGA mode. (The palette gives it away.)
> 
> For a 21st century firmware designed for 21st century hardware I
> would like to have 21st century graphics. Please?

Okay, everybody needs to calm down and take a step back here and look
at what we are talking about.  We are talking about an extensive
graphics infrastructure to display a splash screen for firmware
that can be up and into the kernel in less then a second.  Coreinfo
comes up so quickly on a Geode that it is visible when the monitor
finishes syncing.  Indeed, we are going to have to SLOW DOWN our 
payloads in order to display a splashscreen long enough for people
to read it.

Ron is right, there is something soothing about a splash screen - it
warms the hearts of our customers.  But come on - PNG?  PCX?  
16 bit color depths?  Is this really needed?  I am not at all interested
in making libpayload into a fully featured graphics engine - there are
better libraries that can do that.  All I was trying to do was something
simple to benefit Ron, and since every distribution in the world uses
isolinux + lss16, I figured that was a good shot.

Thats just my opinion - as always, patches are gladly accepted.  Just
remember who we are, what we are doing.  Somebody at the Linux Plumbers
Conference said, "Every time I see a splash screen, I wonder what they
have to hide".  Coreboot is the only loader on earth that doesn't actually
have anything to hide.  Lets try not to go overboard architecting a solution
for one problem we don't have.

Jordan


-- 
Jordan Crouse
Systems Software Development Engineer 
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.